Wout van Aert takes flight to end series of near-misses at Tour de France

A blistering uphill acceleration by Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) on a nominally inoffensive fourth category climb has netted the Belgian star both a remarkable victory in the Tour de France leader’s jersey and simultaneously ended his run of successive second places on the race’s opening three stages.

After his remarkable 2021 Tour de France, where Van Aert won over Mont Ventoux, in the Saint Emilion time trial and on the Champs-Elysées, it was hard to imagine he could surprise cycling fans with an even greater display of his seemingly boundless versatility in the same race.

But on the seemingly straightforward ascent of the Côte du Cap Blanc-Nez at the end of stage 4, a sustained acceleration by Jumbo-Visma proved otherwise.

After his three second places on the three preceding stages, it almost felt like poetic justice that, rather than Primož Roglič or Jonas Vingegaard, Van Aert was the last segment of the yellow-and-black coloured rocket to blast off, some 500 metres from the summit. And even if he only ever had a maximum lead of 30 seconds on the ten undulating kilometres that followed, the Belgian never looked as if he was flagging en route to the seventh Tour win of his career.

As Van Aert recounted afterwards, “the plan was really made long before the Tour had started, because if you looked at the course, it was quite demanding, always up and down. So the aim was to try for both the GC and for the green jersey.

“There were 50 points at finish line and maybe with bit more wind, we’d have tried something for Jonas and Primož. But we knew that hitting the climb hard was good for both goals.”

Van Aert remains in yellow for a third straight day, with a strengthened advantage of 25 seconds over Yves Lampaert (AlphaVinyl-QuickStep), while his lead in the green jersey – his main goal in this race – is now 61 points over his closest adversary, Fabio Jakobsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck). At the corresponding point last year, eventual winner Mark Cavendish had a lead of just seven points.

Winning a stage, no matter whether in yellow or green, was not something that Van Aert ever believed was beyond his possibilities, even though he understandably said before leaving Denmark his run of second places had produced “mixed feelings.”

“I think maybe in the whole world, I was the person who was most patient and confident that victory would come,” he said.

“In Denmark, it was nice to do what I did, but to be second in first two bunch sprints was not expected either,…

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Wout van Aert takes flight to end series of near-misses at Tour de France

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